Unrequited Dancers
by yellowis4happy
Summary: Inspired by a single powerful sentence from 'Memoirs of a Geisha.' She had been so close to what she'd longed for for years, and now it was too late. KougaKagome, one-shot.


A/N: I've been wanting to write a KougaKagome story for a while, and this just hit me like a ton of bricks while I was reading _Memoirs of a Geisha _the other day. You can find the sentence mentioned in the summary on page 349.

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**Unrequited Dancers**

It wasn't until years later that Kagome first understood how similar they both really were. It struck her with such force that it stopped her in her absent-minded twirling so suddenly she was almost sent tumbling onto the wet, frothy surface of the beach. The dark, swaying locks of her hair came to a slow stillness, resting against the lightly scarred skin of her pale, oval-shaped face. A cold knot gathered heavily inside her chest, and a cool breeze coiled up the bluff, ruffling her bangs and twining itself through the thick fall of hair around her shoulders; framing her sorrow-stricken eyes with its chillen embrace.

*

(_If Inuyasha could see me now, who would he see?_)

*

The day that the well had changed from a magical time-traveling device into an ancient, dusty wooden crater in the ground, Kagome had felt something in her die.

The steady numbing sensation that had washed over her heart that day had ever so slowly thawed since, throbbing as it trickled down her scar-mottled cheekbones in the form of bitter tears, but the shadow of Kikyou in her expression was still somehow stronger than ever before. She was now so accustomed to it that she barely recognized the bright, innocent girl shining back at her in all her junior high yearbooks, pictured besides the neatly printed black lettering that read "Higurashi Kagome."

Of course it was painful, to look in the mirror every day and see flashes of the woman who had succeeded, in the end, in winning her old lover back.

He had stood, subdued in his sorrow, after the fateful battle that had felled both the demon slayer and the monk as they had rushed to protect Kagome

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(_Hurry, hurry_)

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and failed to see the tentacles lurking behind them, until the moment they wriggled and writhed in the torn cavities of their gaping chests.

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(_Faster_)

*

Kagome only had herself to talk to about the cheerful days before those terrible deaths, when they had hunted for the glittering, fractured pieces of her poor aim and quarreled amongst themselves about frivolous, incorrigible problems.

Remembering this now, Kagome lifted her head, gaze drawn away from their absent-minded stare at the bland gray sand that sucked at the bottoms of her feet, almost expecting to see the familiar, fierce tunnel of wind to be rushing toward her in a slicing arc across the beach.

The same tunnel that had gripped her in its strong arms and grappled to hold onto her

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(_It's okay_)

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as she had fought to escape its grip, fought to reach the wilting black and purple petals, so frail in her mind's eye, as they fell in a crimson heap to the ashy surface of the earth, their bodies tangled into a painfully beautiful collage of life, love, and death.

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(_I've got you_)

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He was the enemy, her savior.

A foe whom she had cursed for clutching her screaming form out of reach of Death, whose Own hand now cradled the silver-haired body of her first and only love and his glassy-eyed, clay-bodied priestess.

He had taken the curses she had hurled at him, the weak pounding of her small fists on his armored chest, and all her tears that had soaked into his callused, tawny skin, without complaint or anger. He had held her until her sobs had turned to hiccups and silent shaking, until she had wiped her eyes on her tattered sleeve and turned away, and then he had let her go.

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(_He knew_)

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With a sudden, startling intensity that she had not known for years, Kagome burst into tears. Her knees gave way beneath her and she crumpled onto the sand, her breath coming in strangled hitches that burned her throat and chest.

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(_That she would not come back_)

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They had been such fools, both of them chasing after what they could never have. They had been so alike, and yet, she had always failed to see it.

Until now.

Now, when it was all too late.

She sobbed violently, the moist salt water of the sea reaching out and dragging at the hem of her dress with its relentlessly groping fingers. Her heart was breaking all over again. She cried for herself, caught between two worlds; for Inuyasha, caught between two women; for Kikyou, caught between Life and Death.

*

(_A breath of air, tainted by the faint perfume of her skin_)

*

She cried for Miroku and Sango, who never had the chance to be together, and she cried for all the others who had died or lost loved ones in the never-ending cycle of the Shikon no Tama, all those years ago. It felt like with each tear, a piece of the sorrow she had been nursing deep inside her broke off and floated away in the ocean breeze like a tiny black butterfly.

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But most of all, she cried for Kouga, and his foolishness in loving her.

At length, she felt like she could have loved him back.

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(_Goodbye)_

_*_


End file.
